Go to your local movie theater and sit close enough to the screen and you'll see something: holes. At the cinema everyone uses perforated screens with the speakers behind the screen to maximize both screen size and immersion. The audio comes from the screen you are watching and not from the sides or floor.

At home, acoustically transparent screens have been around for years but have always had flaws. The size of the holes required for allowing sound to pass through are often visible from normal seating distances in the home. Also, much of the light passes through the screen, and this reduces the brightness of the image you will see. These two flaws often means that these screens were only used in the most expensive home theaters, where expensive projectors with brighter images were available.

These limitations have been vanishing the past few years. A projector you can buy for $3,000 now has more than enough brightness to allow some loss through the perforations. We have also seen the introduction of woven screens that allow sound to pass through, but also have a fine texture that is invisible from a normal distance.

One such screen material is the Enlightor 4K from Seymour Screen Excellence. Boasting ISF certification for image quality and said to be acoustically transparent from 100 Hz to 20 kHz, it looks to be a screen material that can give you that movie theater immersion at home. Go to Page 2: In Use